Chris Kennedy has taken a page out of the late Mayor Harold Washington’s playbook in talking about all the cash J.B. Pritzker is throwing at black ward organizations.

Pritzker needs to buy forgiveness after those insulting comments he made about African-American politicians were caught on FBI tape and made public in the Tribune last month.

Since then, Pritzker has been meeting privately with black ministers, and writing checks to black ward organizations — and I figure some walking around cash, too — to buy some love.

A whole lotta love.

“Since J.B. Pritzker started his apology tour for those comments about African American leadership, he’s given $374,000 to political organizations across the state, more than $159,000 of which went to committeemen in the Cook County Democratic Party,” Kennedy said. Pritzker recently put another $7 million of his own money into his campaign for governor.

“With the addition of $7 million just two weeks before the election, he is poised to spend approximately $500,000 a day to try and buy victory,” Kennedy said Friday. “He’s taken pay-to-play politics and amplified the system from pay-to-play to fund-to-forgive and fee-to-forget. He’s buying off the leadership.”

Pritzker is the candidate of Boss Madigan and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and has spent an obscene $63 million for the primary alone so far, and he’s still polling only in the low 30s.

That’s political malpractice.

In the last days of this Democratic campaign, the key to victory — as it always has been for Democrats — will be found in black neighborhoods, with black votes.

Many voters are undecided. The Kennedy name is strong in the African-American community, particularly among voters who were there in the civil rights struggle. They remember Kennedy’s father, Sen. Robert Kennedy, assassinated in 1968.

And so, after that FBI tape where Pritzker counsels then Gov. Rod Blagojevich on ways to find the “least offensive” black candidates to support, in order to handle “your African-American thing,” Pritzker needs love from African-American ward organizations.

So Kennedy invoked the memory of Harold Washington in his final campaign days before the March 20 Democratic primary for governor.

“If you’re in a nursing home and they ask you to support J.B. Pritzker, ask them if they got a government contract from the state of Illinois. If your ward organization urges you to vote for Pritzker, ask the leadership if they took money from him. If your pastor says vote for Pritzker, ask if they took money from J.B.

“And then remember the words of Harold Washington — take his money, just give me your vote.”

I remember the words of Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor.

I was there covering Washington’s stunning mayoral campaign against incumbent Mayor Jane Byrne and Cook County State’s Atty. Richard Daley, who would later become mayor himself.

The Democratic machine organizations operated much the same way as J.B. Pritzker is operating now, by “reaching out” to pastors and black ward organizations. Back in Harold’s day, white candidates would load trucks full of hams and turkeys, deliver them to black Democratic ward committeemen to pass out in African-American neighborhoods.

The hams, the turkeys, the cash, were tokens of political love from the machine.

Washington knew that voters — and ward organizations — wouldn’t turn down free money, or free poultry and pork, even from a political machine once commonly thought of as racist. So Washington would tell the people to “Take the hams, take the turkey, take the money, and vote for Harold.”

And they did just that.

Kennedy made his remarks standing in the cold outside 111 W. Washington St., the offices of the Illinois Democratic Party, whose chairman is the Pritzker guy, Boss Madigan.

Kennedy has slammed Madigan for his indifferent handling of sexual harassment complaints against women, and for making a fortune in a private tax reduction law business that Kennedy and most others see as a blatant conflict of interest.

And the liberal Democratic wing led by another leading candidate for governor, Dan Biss, has been pressuring Madigan as well.

Madigan has been so unnerved that he asked Sen. Dick Durbin to make robo calls on Madigan’s behalf. The idea is to shore up Madigan’s hold on the Democratic Party as its Illinois chairman.

In the calls, Durbin ridiculously refers to Madigan as a “true progressive,” which is the most laughable line of this entire political cycle.

If Pritzker fails after spending $63 million or more, it will be because of the African-American vote going to Kennedy. And that spells danger for another Pritzker ally, Rahm Emanuel.

The mayor will have trouble enough holding onto City Hall. The last thing he needs is to lose Pritzker, and see black voters energized going into the 2019 mayoral campaign.

At Kennedy’s news conference, he was told black Democratic ward committeemen were upset at Kennedy’s suggestion they could be bought off by Pritzker cash.

“Did they take the money?” Kennedy said.

Yes, they took the money.

“I’d say they took the money. When you take the money, you took the money. And then you’ve been taken,” Kennedy said.